Amazon Kinesis does heavy-lifting on streaming, big data

Amazon Web Services is making it easier for a broader range of organizations to process high volumes of data in real-time through Amazon Kinesis, a fully managed service for streaming and analyzing data.

Using Amazon Kinesis, government agencies or businesses can quickly store and process terabytes of data generated from many sources such as marketing and financial transactions, social media feeds, logs and metering data and location-tracking events, according to Amazon officials.

For many organizations this would require deploying complex software and layers of information technology infrastructure that is expensive to buy, manage and provision. However, Kinesis lets users easily set up high-capacity network pipes that can collect and analyze data in real time, at any scale, officials said.

With Amazon Kinesis applications, developers can build real-time dashboards, capture exceptions and generate alerts, drive recommendations and make other real-time business or operational decisions based on geospatial data, inventory levels and any machine data from the Internet of Things. For example, Amazon Kinesis can collect the high throughput volumes of data generated by applications, infrastructure operations and mobile devices — and make it available for fast identification of exceptions, slow queries, page views, click-through paths or resource utilization, the company said. Kinesis users can also send data to a variety of other Amazon services that handle big data such as Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon Redshift.

To process fast moving data in real-time, Kinesis users provision the level of input and output required for their data stream, in blocks of 1 megabyte/ sec, using the AWS web management console, application programming interfaces or software development kits. The size of the stream can be adjusted up or down without restarting the stream and without any impact on the data sources pushing data to Amazon Kinesis, company officials said.

Once the stream has been created, users can start loading their data with simple HTTP PUTs. Amazon Kinesis automatically manages the infrastructure, storage, networking and configuration to collect and process the data at the level of throughput an application requires. Users only pay for the resources they use. Amazon Kinesis is currently available in the U.S. East Region (northern Virginia) and will be rolled out to other AWS regions in the coming months.